INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE HABITUAL

Infrastructures of the Habitual: Black-boxed landscapes and an economy of thought

“What if we mobilize such critique in relation to the geopolitics of hardware? What if our mobile-consumer selves have to be understood in connection with the heavier burden of hardware, labor, and work processes? For instance, the outsourcing of production is also an outsourcing of this hardware geology from the Western perspective to far-away places.”

PARIKKA, 2015, P. 90

Looking at the sites of mineral harvesting and mining can be a very unsettling experience. Much like the uncanny valleys of computer-generated figures that almost share identical resemblance to a human being can evoke a sense of unease, such sites are not only uncanny but sublime: they portray a place paradoxically too alien and too familiar to our own perception, almost too unnatural to our own senses and too natural for our past inhabiting of the Earth, almost too complex for our eyes and too deep in time for our brains to handle. But yet, they grasp our senses in wonder and our instincts in apprehension. And even though they carry signs of digitality - patterns of distinction that could only have been inscribed by a human + machine entanglement - such sites are sites of encounter, sites where natural “wilderness” encounters human “rationality”, sites where the digital becomes possible, sites where contemporary mediated capitalism sets its grounds, sites where hard labor becomes infrastructure, sites where human history encounters the deep-time history of the Earth. They are one of the crucial critical points of tension where the intra-active elements of the digital collide. Entangled to every bit of software, a bit of labor, a bit of Earth, a bit of muddy waste, black-boxed in the chains of its hardware.

On the one hand, these sites are deeply connected to the more tangible aspects of our contemporary consumer technology. Hardware entangles within its black box a myriad of metals, polymers and chemicals that are coming from, or produced at these places at ever uncanny paces. As the new media theorist Jussi Parikka states, “the geological materials of metals and chemicals get deterritorialized from their strata and reterritorialized in machines that define our technical media culture” (Parikka, 2015, p. 35). These are sites where geological materials get first deterritorialized, and under contemporary capitalism and its globalized modes of production (and chains of underpaid labor), such places become infrastructural agents that maintain not only global modes of production in action, but the quotidian ever-more digitally mediated modes of living.

FIG. 19 P. 24-25: SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE GRASBERG GOLD AND COPPER OPEN PIT MINE IN INDONESIA.

FIG. 20: SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHY OF A LITHIUM HARVESTING SITE AT THE ATACAMA DESERT, CHILE.

FIGURES 19, 20: RESEARCH: MATERIAL HARVESTING

Satellite imagery of the Grasberg gold and copper open pit mine in Indonesia and a lithium harvesting site at the Atacama desert in Chile. The selected images exhibit a clear distinction between the smoothness of the “natural” habitat and the striated, distinctive, tamed, segmented occupation of the space by the harvesting infrastructures.

From an Earth-view perspective, however, these places are uncanny points of accelerated erosion, sedimentation and transformation with both local and global deep-time impacts - harder, even, on the outsourced localities and not so much on the (too often western and northern) outsourcers. Thus they are clashing points of not only different materialities but also different temporalities, all of which gets polished and enclosed inside black boxes for consumption.

On the other hand, such places themselves are not only sites of harvesting and mining, but landscapes of our own matter of distinction through recognition and thinking. It is that basic acquired habit of humans in perceiving things as discrete pieces, recognizing them as objects, and taking them from their habitat for further both abstract and concrete use that may be at the core of these sites. They are reduct of this process ad infinitum, extensively going deeper into Earth’s core, or sprawling over its vast deserts. These landscapes are not only sources but also remains of this process. They are the very picture of a digital materialism taking action, for they exhibit the tensions of the digital distinction with the inescapable rawness of the earthly habitats they exist on. They are eroded images whose materials will be sedimented, filtered and turned into “pure”, clean, discrete pieces and sheets; and whose “purity” will be discarded, reinserted and become part of other far-away places at not-so-distant futures. All done by a myriad of hard-working bodies and processes that are hardly ever made visible. It is once again, however, on the outsourcing of labor - a labor of harvesting and mining but also a labor of distinction and segmentation - that the black boxing of these landscapes lies on. If for our thinking, distinctively thinking has become an inescapable matter of conscious activity, the neglecting of these places made far-away with all their complexities and black-boxed hard labor they engender are rather a matter of unconscious activity. And if such cognitive black-box is passable of thorough inspection through conscious thinking, we are dealing rather with a sort of acquired and non-human iterative form of habitual thinking.

“The unconscious contains not only the painful matters which consciousness prefers to not inspect, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them. Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought.”

BATESON, 2000, P. 141

Thus if we continue on what might be called a speculative exercise of “pychogeophysics” (Parikka, 2015, p.59), infrastructures are not only the materialization of habits - since the routine and repetition of needs get materialized in tangible structures and labor chains - but they are also the ones supporting habits and reproducing them further.

FIG. 21: EARTH BATTERY EXPERIMENT

FIGURE 21: ENACTMENT: EARTH BATTERY

An enactment of a small-scale Earth battery. An Earth battery consists of a pair of different metal electrodes that are buried within the soil using water as an electrolytic solution. Large-scale earth batteries are potentially able of tapping telluric currents, but the small-scale experiment could only provide a very small current (however up to a voltage of 0.1V) coming from the very mixture of elements in the soil and water. The experiment was conducted to (in an almost alchemical manner) extract a signal from an ore of pure raw earthly dirt. The output signal showcased the chaotic unstable oscillations of the complex mixture of matters within the ore, as opposed to the filtered, stable, and “clean” type of energy that is expected from consumer technology batteries.

For the matters of such places are both too “painful” and too “familiar” (Bateson, 2000, p. 141) for conscious thought to inspect them, what we have instead are logical structures that automate thought - a habitual automation that runs not through neurons but through the non-human flows of energy, material, and labor within infrastructures. Would an inspection on such black-boxed infrastructures reveal not only glimpses of their inner-workings but also matters of thought upon which we have ceased to consciously address? Case in point, if we inspect the infrastructures of mining and harvesting that support the production of hardware as mentioned above, we find habitual loops materialized both on the hard repetitive labor of mining and extracting, but also on the machineries breaking, sorting and filtering matter present at such sites, on the continuous supplying and transport of the extracted materials to other far-away places, as well as the repetitive chains of production upon which each site is connected in the other end. All automatic, all black-boxed, all working as intricate pieces of machineries on a tight clock. The habitual is therefore the underlying mechanism of capitalism itself, which abuses of it as a black-box apparatus for the support of its own structures. We deal indeed, with a “major economy of conscious thought” (Bateson, 2000, p. 141). Capitalism relies on such mechanism, it relies on the lack of thinking and the sustaining of the habitual in all of its levels, for the troubled concrete encounter with these habitats, its harshness and muddy matters as well as the bodies working within them could possibly generate concrete thinking once again and the departure or ceasing of its chains. The loops of repetition materialized through infrastructures may thus be of the cognitive type, and in neoliberal capitalism the habitats they engender suffer geographic displacement by means of the black-boxing effects of the habitual. Thus the human and non-human elements entangled in the production of hardware, from its very beginning in these habitats, turn disguised inside black-boxes after black-boxes, until they fold (among a myriad of other apparatuses) into limpid, crispy surfaces of our contemporary devices and eager, pointing fingers taping at their surfaces on a habitual routine.

This line of events happens, however, in different planes and in a strict, segmented manner. From the very segmentation of the smooth and raw space of the land where the harvesting and mining complexes first takes place, to the segmentation of minerals, to the segmentation of work forces into labor castes, to the segmentation of each filtering and production cycle, to the segmentation between “hardware” and “software” of engineering companies, to at last, the segmentation between the individual who interacts with technological components and the individuals and habitats where they are coming from. Black-boxes require segmentation, insofar they are separate, discrete pieces that render all of its inner-workings invisible. While we are, as Deleuze and Guattari pointed, “segmentary animals” (Deleuze,

Guattari, 1987, p 208), segmentarity occurs as a mechanism of power. But other than following an inquiry on segmentation itself, let us attain to how the segmentation of each part of a material’s life in the above thread engenders a black-boxing effect. Segmentation as a black-boxing phenomenon happens insofar there is a certain power that turns invisible (by displacement) and encapsulated (by disguising) each part separately for the better maintaining of the system itself. This power happens, however, not necessarily by means of a regulatory agency, but rather, it is inherent to the segmentary act, and thus becomes embodied in the very objects in question. For instance, the mining of mineral ores from Congo and its segmentation into “filtered” copper pieces within a printed circuit board, turns the whole social, natural, historical and political complexities entangled at the extracting of such ores into black-boxed segmented pieces of metal. While one single piece of purified copper is incapable of black-boxing the whole habitat it engenders, it is a vector, one iteration on a loop of a habitual mechanism that after iterative repetition becomes effectively concrete and tangible. As mentioned earlier, the globalized form of capitalism needs these mechanisms of power for its maintenance. But not only: for on the one hand, segmentation acts on black-boxing by means of power and non-visibility; but on the other hand, segmentation and segmented black-boxes are part of a habitual thinking that acts on the layers of perception.

The graph (Fig. 22) delineates how, in the words of the philosophers, “the segmented line (macro politics) is immersed in and prolonged by quantum flows (micro politics) that continually reshuffle and stir up its segments” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, p. 218). For them, the difference between the segmented line and a “quantum flow” is that the later “implies something tending to elude or escape the codes”, having “signs or degrees of deterritorialization in the decoded flow”. Whereas the segmented, rigid line, implies “an overcoding that substitutes itself for the faltering codes” and its segments are “like reterritorializations on the overcoding or overcoded line” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1987, p. 219). The graph and the differentiation between the quanta and the segment and their repeated iteration could be taken to different plateaus for the furthering of our discourse. On the level of infrastructures and the habitats of harvesting, the bodies and machineries performing the selection, gathering and filtering of matter embodies the rigid, overcoding power centers that segments lines; whereas the habitat, its matters and landscapes turn into quanta, or the ones who have degrees of inherent deterritorialization, but get overcoded instead. On the level of consumption and cognition, it is both softwares and its infrastructures as well as hardware and its infrastructures the ones who overcode, stratify, and segment bodies; however

FIGURE 22: DELEUZE, GUATTARI, 1987, P. 218

Cycle/period of Micro politics x Macro politics:

A: flow and poles a: quanta b: line and segments B: power center

bodies themselves are quanta that could yet elude or escape the codes, but are trapped by the habitual power of infrastructural segmentation that turns them into discrete quantifiable pieces. Quanta in this sense engenders thinking, an escape of the imprisonment of habitual, segmented, discrete lines. We could thus understand the portrayed loop as the basic iteration of the habitual in our discourse. In both abstract and concrete manners, matter is segmented and turned discrete in a habitual loop, but it contains and carries the potential for its escape. For even in a full state of sorted matter, or in a full state of unsorted matter, the in-between, ambiguous, unclassifiable, unrecognizable states evades encoding.

FIG. 23: EXPERIMENT WITH A MAGNET ATTACHED TO MOTOR AND PLATE WITH IRON POWDER

FIG. 24: SORTED MATTERS OF THE ABOVE PROCESS (SILICA SAND AND IRON POWDER)

FIGURES 23-25: REENACTING SORTING MECHANISMS

As a research for reenacting habitual sorting mechanisms present in material harvesting infrastructures, the images portray two experiments with the sorting and unsorting of two different types of dust (powdered) materials, one magnetic (iron powder) and another non-magnetic (silica) with the means of an e-waste magnet. The experiments exhibited not only the potentialities of the setup into coding and decoding matter, but also the thresholds between sorted and unsorted particles and their in-between states, ultimately sharing a cognitive resemblance to a landscape or territorial formation both in its physical aspects (different compounds of dust materials sedimented together) and its plastic ones (abstract formations taking a consistent shape).

FIG. 25: IN-BETWEEN SORTING MATTERS OF THE MENTIONED PROCESS (FIG. 24) (SILICA SAND AND IRON POWDER)

“Forms imply a code, modes of coding and decoding. Substances as formed matters refer to territorialities and degrees of territorialization and deterritorialization. But each articulation has a code and a territoriality; therefore each possesses both form and substance.”

DELEUZE, GUATTARI, 1987, P. 41

Lastly, the notion of “code” in relation to segmentation takes both an abstract and a concrete meaning to our discussion. Code is a mechanism of power and distinction: it segments a particular quanta iteratively, so as it to be enclosed (or territorialized) into a symbol. Coding is thus turning unrecognized and disordered matter into a discrete object of representation and meaning to execute an order. To bring it closer to our concrete reality, code is inscribed within hardware not only through software, but on the very segmented matter that it is consisted of, for the matter it encloses was already part of a process of distinction and segmentation at a far-away habitat of production. The labor of material harvesting, parsing, sorting, filtering, and purifying is a process of encoding matter, of turning matter into objects of representation, and thus carriers of a certain habit of perception. Coding in this sense can be seen as the inscribing process of the habitual, and infrastructures the agencies of power that encode not only matter but bodies for economizing thought in a capitalist mode of production.

Paradoxically, infrastructures themselves are also the embodiments of the habitual. While the iterative nature of the habitual and the segmented line may engender a sense of processual causality, it is only so inside specific cuts within the big chaotic picture, for the materiality in which we deal with is of a different nature. All parts are intra-actively entangled and thus simultaneously instantiated, as we have discussed in previously. Infrastructures are only maintained if there are myriads of bodies and objects encoding and being encoded by them, if there are habits that both support and constitute them. The performing of a technological habit of social networking, for instance, is simultaneously linked to the embodiment of such habit back inside its hardware, back inside its infrastructures, back inside the far-away habitats and the first codding of matter. And in each and every stage, distinction plays its role by segmenting Earth into landscapes of production, and thus engendering the habitual perception of it as order. Everything is thus, repeated and intra-actively maintained at ever increasing speeds by myriads of entities performing segmentation.

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